Chapter 3 tells of the rise and fall of the Hebrew Law Society, founded in 1917, which sought to base the law of the Jewish state on secularized and modern Jewish content. All the members of the Hebrew Law Society wanted a national Jewish-Hebrew legal system, but did not agree about what materials would be used in its construction, nor on the way to construct this new legal edifice, or about who would be the architects and builders. The Society’s problem was that it could not limit itself to an academic debate over these questions. On the contrary, it was founded with the purpose of shaping clear, detailed, and explicit legal norms, building legal institutions, and crafting the whole cloth of a legal system that would stand ready for the Jewish state when it was founded. But the practical need to translate Jewish values into clear legal rules paralyzed the Hebrew Law Society and brought an end to the attempts to make Hebrew law into the living law of a modern society. The Society collapsed before World War II, a decade before Israel was founded.